An earthly blogger has been hacked to loss of life in north-east Bangladesh, the 1/3 such lethal assault this year.
Police stated Ananta Bijoy Das became murdered as he headed to paintings at a bank in the city of Sylhet, an assault that fellow writers said highlighted a subculture of impunity.
Kamrul Hasan, commissioner of Sylhet police, stated a set of about four masked attackers pounced on Das with machetes at approximately 8.30am on Tuesday on a hectic avenue in Bangladesh’s fifth-biggest city.
“They chased him down the street and first attacked his head with their machetes and then attacked him all over his frame,” Hasan advised Agence France-Presse. The attackers fled into the crowds and Das become taken to sanatorium but declared lifeless on arrival, police and medics said.
American atheist blogger hacked to dying in Bangladesh
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Hasan would now not be drawn on the reason for the assault however fellow writers said Das were on a hitlist drawn up with the aid of militants who have been behind the current killing of a blogger who changed into a US citizen.
Imran Sarker, head of a Bangladeshi bloggers’ affiliation, said Das turned into an atheist who wrote blogs for Mukto-Mona, a website formerly moderated by means of Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-born US citizen who changed into stabbed to death inside the capital, Dhaka, in February.
Sarker informed the Dad or mum: “They [the government] have to know not stay in electricity, if they may be no longer able to deliver the perpetrators to justice. One after some other incident is occurring and they’re not capable of do whatever.”
Debasish Debu, a pal of Das, stated the 33-12 months-vintage banker become also an editor of a quarterly mag referred to as Jukti (Good judgment) and headed the Sylhet-primarily based technological know-how and rationalist council.
Debu stated Das have been receiving threats for his writing and that their frequency expanded after the killing of Roy. “He had written approximately superstitions, but he wasn’t among the writers that would hurt the sentiments of faith,” Debu said.
In keeping with the Mukto-Mona website, Das received the book’s annual rationalist award in 2006 for his “deep and brave hobby in spreading secular and humanist beliefs and messages”.
Even as maximum of Das’s output for Mukto-Mona centered on technological know-how and evolution, he wrote a number of blogs that criticised a few factors of Islam and also of Hinduism. He additionally wrote a poem eulogising the famed Bangladeshi secular creator Taslima Nasreen, who fled to Europe in 1994 after protests with the aid of Islamists.
In feedback on Fb published early on Tuesday, Das criticised the neighborhood member of parliament from the ruling Awami League celebration for criticising one of the united states’s top secular and technological know-how fiction writers.
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His homicide comes a week after al-Qaida within the Indian Subcontinent claimed responsibility for Roy’s killing on 26 February wherein his spouse became badly injured. An Islamist has been arrested over his murder. Any other atheist blogger, Washiqur Rahman, turned into hacked to dying in Dhaka in March. Two madrassa students have been arrested over that assault.
Bangladesh is a formally secular u. S. But more than ninety% of it’s a hundred and sixty million populace are Muslims. There was a growth in assaults by means of religious extremists in the latest years. Supporters of Bangladesh’s largest Islamist celebration, that is banned from standing in elections, had been accused of being at the back of a spate of firebombings this year aimed toward toppling the authorities.
Considering 2013, at least 5 bloggers had been attacked by way of Islamists after some other hardline group, Hefazat-e-Islam, publicly sought the execution of atheists who organised mass protests towards the upward push of political Islam.
Hefazat, led with the aid of Islamic seminary instructors, additionally staged a massive counter-protest towards the bloggers in May additionally 2013 that unleashed violence and left almost 50 humans lifeless.
